Reynolds by Donley Watt

"Reynolds is a forty-something liquor-store owner on Clear Creek Lake, near Cottonwood, in East Texas. Once he was a banker, but the real estate scandals of the '80s taught him he had trusted the wrong people and brought him within a hair of an indictment. Once he had a wife and twin sons, but she left after the scandal, taking the boys to Daddy's ranch in West Texas. Now Reynolds owns Lake Country Liquor Store and lives in a trailer behind the store, with several women passing through his life for intermittent periods. He's satisfied - but a little dissatisfied." Reynolds also has a weird family, from whom he's mostly estranged. His mother, Edwina, is a bible beater, fond of giving sermonettes to Reynolds, her older son who has strayed from the church and lived in sin with women. His brother, Perry, is a survivalist with a stash of AK47s and other automatic weapons, which he sells illegally from time to time. Perry also teaches government in the local high school, but his job is in peril because he's been teaching his own anti-government views. And Perry has a dark secret hidden in his past. The boys' father, Ray Reynolds, Sr., is a retired Ford truck dealer who's bent on inventing the perpetual motion machine and leaves his wife to live as a hermit at the lake and focus on his invention.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Reynolds

Kirkus Reviews

In their family, Perry is the beloved son, Reynolds the outcast, while their dad, Ray Senior, a retired Ford pickup dealer (his yellow-gray hair is “the color of foam that floats to the top when you boil a chicken”), leaves their daft mother Edwina to thump her Bible while he tries to invent a pe...